The Right Geek: right geek podcast

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Saturday, June 19, 2021

One Review, One Advertisement, and Several Streams

Let's open this post with the review: Yesterday, I started - and rapidly finished - Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, which is absolutely outstanding and thus earns my highest recommendation. Indeed, I don't think I've been this excited about a book in quite some time.

How shall we describe the premise of Weir's third novel? Well, I read it as an offspring of a marriage between The Martian (reviewed here) and my favorite first contact narratives (like, for example, James Cambias' A Darkling Sea, reviewed here), .

Like Mark Watney, the protagonist and point-of-view character in Project Hail Mary - Dr. Ryland Grace - is a wise-cracking, super-skilled scientist who must rely on his wits to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. In this case, however, the primary test he faces is not mere survival but an imminent apocalypse: a newly-discovered space-faring unicellular lifeform is syphoning energy off our sun (and off many other stars in our local cluster), and Grace has been sent to Tau Ceti on a fast-tracked suicide mission to find a solution before crop failures and radical climate change destroy the human race.

Interestingly, the above remit is not something Grace realizes right off the bat; interestingly, it is something he has to discover gradually after waking up from an extended medically-induced coma with severe memory loss. And it is this choice to situate the main character in the same condition of ignorance as the reader as to the full context of his predicament that, in part, makes for a riveting story.

The other thing that kept me turning the pages besides Grace's slow-to-resolve amnesia (and, of course, Earth's impending doom) is "Rocky," our second principal character. "Rocky" (dubbed thus by Grace because of his mineral-based exoskeleton) is an ammonia-breathing alien spider from the Eridani system who has come to Tau Ceti to save his own species from the very same invasive organism that is threatening Earth. It is "Rocky" who brings the Darkling Sea elements to the table; after Grace and "Rocky" encounter each other, much of the middle chapters are devoted to their attempts to 1.) recognize each other's sapience, 2.) communicate, and 3.) learn about each other's biology and cultural traditions. I suppose another breed of reader might find such exposition boring, but I don't; on the contrary, I'm attracted to science fiction precisely because it tackles this challenge of mutual comprehension so often.

Plus? "Rocky" is so. damned. likable. Once Grace and "Rocky" learn the basics of each other's languages and it's revealed that they're both the sole survivors of their respective missions, they strike up a genuine, heart-felt friendship that, at several points, moved me to tears. The end of chapter 19 in particular is a stand-out moment. I actually had to stop for a while to collect myself before proceeding to chapter 20.

Bottom line, what we have in Project Hail Mary is a book that brings several positives to the table: 1.) sympathetic characters, 2.) high stakes, and 3.) more than one intellectually engaging mystery. On top of all that, we can add the fact that our main characters do not, as we eventually learn, hail from the cream of the crop. "Rocky" is a workhorse engineer, and Grace -- well, I don't want to spoil the specifics about his history, but suffice it to say that he's not a stellar specimen either. And I like what that says, implicitly, about the heroic capacities of ordinary people. This novel is competence porn -- but it's also Human Wave to the core. A+

Now for the advertisement: If you have the time, I encourage all of you to sign up for the July 3rd Zoom seminar that's been arranged by The Society of Tolkien. Said seminar promises to celebrate Tolkien's works as they were intended to be celebrated: without Current Year nonsense. Because of course, Tolkien was a mid-20th century Catholic fantasy writer who, if he were ported to 2021, would find present-day fixations utterly incomprehensible and bizarre.

(Yes, I'm throwing shade at a certain converged organization that shall remain nameless. And no, I'm not even remotely sorry about that. Authorial intent does matter -- and so does historical context.)

And finally, here are the links to my most recent streams:

This one is our discussion of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

This one is our regular Iron Man stream, which covered the latest annual, a plot-arc from the early 2000's, and one story from Tales of Suspense.

And this is the one we streamed today on C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet.

Hope you enjoy!

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Podcast #9 w/#1 Marmaduke Fan & Disney Princess Nonsense

The return of my podcast went well -- audio issues aside. If you were unable to watch the stream live (I know I was up against some big channels whose audiences are my targets), click play below:

Now, for the rest of this post, I'm going to expand on my brief remarks regarding one of this weekend's controversies du jour: the supposed sexism of Snow White, Cinderella, and The Little Mermaid.

I've always been a little skeptical of the romantic tropes featured in many Disney princess films. I don't think you can know someone is your "true love" the instant you meet them; infatuation can happen in a split second, perhaps, but love requires conversation and a great deal of time in your potential partner's company. And truthfully, if I had girls who were old enough to be interested in boys, I probably would remind them that Disney movies are (often sanitized) re-tellings of classic fairy tales whose deep historical purpose was not to serve as a mere guidebook to dating in the real world. However --

As I mentioned in last night's broadcast, I watched Snow White yesterday for the first time since my childhood, and yes: the fact that the prince is essentially a non-entity in that film does bother me at the superficial level. But does that mean I think Snow White is sexist -- or that it teaches terrible lessons about consent? No.

Granted, Snow White is a very stereotypically "feminine" character. She's frightened of the woods. Her vulnerability and beauty quickly attract a crowd of adorable forest creatures. She enjoys housework and basically mothering the dwarfs. But - mark me, feminists - I don't think there's anything wrong with this. There are plenty of nonfictional women who fit this mold. All of my own mother's talents - sewing, interior decorating, flower arranging, cooking - fall firmly into the "feminine" category, and I will fight anyone who attempts to argue that Mom, therefore, is not strong or worthy of admiration.

I think it's terribly confining and narrow to say that all women must be housewives. I think it's also terribly confining and narrow to say that all women must be butch, independent bad-asses. There is room in the world - and in fiction - for both types.

As I remarked somewhat clumsily last night, the feminist reading of Snow White also fails to see the ways in which the film gently lampoons men. Pre-Snow White, the dwarfs don't know how to keep a tidy house and are, apparently, totally clueless when it comes to table manners. One long sequence in the movie argues pretty explicitly that it takes a woman to remind men to wash and present themselves respectably for dinner. And I know - I know - that every single woman reading this right now is smiling and nodding because we have all seen this exact phenomenon in our own lives. I love you, gentlemen, but it wasn't for no reason that we girls joked about "the four smells of Morgan Hall," the all-male dorm at my first college.

When you get right down to it, Snow White is presented as the civilizing force. That's extraordinarily complimentary to women.

And the prince? The flat character who wakes Snow White from her coma with a kiss? Twitter has done an okay job mocking the #MeToo hysteria over this moment, which has been replicated by happily married couples on many a morn since time immemorial, but I have yet to see anyone on my TL address the Christian cultural genesis of the original story and what its beats are actually supposed to signify. As I said, Snow White's eating of the poisoned apple is an undeniable allusion to Eden -- which means the prince, who resurrects Snow White after her apparent death, is meant to represent Christ, Who has rescued humanity from the death of original sin and will bring about the general resurrection at the end of time. Bottom line, we're talking about a literal deus ex machina here; thus, on a deep level, it doesn't matter that the prince has no apparent reason to love Snow White. Christ has no reason to love us either; His love is perfect and unconditional.

The feminist readings of Cinderella and The Little Mermaid, meanwhile, are just as shallow. That Cinderella suffers as much as she does and yet never becomes bitter - that she is able to remain kind and good and capable of forging real friendships - is a testament to her strength as a character, not her weakness. And I'll say it again: She isn't rescued by a man. She's rescued by little mice who are the beneficiaries of her compassion -- which means, in the end, she does rescue herself by being the sort of person who inspires heroism in others.

And Ariel's crush on Eric is only part of the reason she gives up her voice; she's also driven by a profound curiosity about the human world and a desperate desire to escape her father's strictures and strike out on her own. I was ten years old when The Little Mermaid was released, and because I was precocious and already a little rebellious, I deeply related to the yearning Ariel expresses in "Part of Your World," which goes far beyond the desire for romance.

This rush to condemn any creative work that doesn't hew to the strict, politically-correct script of 2018 is ahistorical, lacking in imagination, and frankly anti-human; we definitely shouldn't be encouraging children to read and interpret texts in accordance with said rush. Instead, we should be helping kids understand each story's context and should encourage them to have empathy for its author(s), who lived in radically different times and places and thus saw the world in radically different ways.